It was a very hard row to hoe for me to get sober. Very, very hard. I barely made it. It took everything I had to get and stay sober. Many times I almost lost this precious sobriety I hold so dear. Having alcoholism is horrible. It’s a horrible condition. It stunted my emotional and mental growth because of the way I metabolized it, I can only say this from the inside, I do not know what it’s like to be a non-alcoholic, but this is what I believe as an alcoholic.

I’ve been free of flour/sugar products for over two years and cigarettes for over one and a half years and I haven’t lost any weight at all. It’s been very discouraging to say the least but I think the tide is finally turning regarding the weight. I think God finally had enough of my wining and stepped in to give me a little advice.

I had a spiritual experience a couple of weeks ago about losing this weight. It went something like this.

God: You know how to lose this weight dear.Me: How?God: You know how.Me: No I don’t.God: Yes you do. You’ve done it two times before the in exact same way with complete success.

EXERCISE !Twenty minutes a day.

God: One time just before you moved to Santa Cruz. And one time while you were in Weight Watchers. It worked like a charm back then and there’s no reason why it won’t work again this time. So… if you really do want to lose this weight… why don’t you…

Get back on the ball.

Well I’ve been doing cardio-exercise (which is what I did before) on the elliptical machine twenty minutes a day since then.

I know I will lose the weight this way. God is right. If I want to lose the weight, I have to exercise. I’ve experienced losing the weight this way two times before. I really do want to lose the weight. Enough so that I don’t have any resentment about doing the exercise anymore. I used to have a big resentment at doing even ten minutes. I’ve always talked myself into this resentment by wining things like…

How come I have to exercise to lose weight and everyone else doesn’t.

But when God talked to me that day, I knew instantly what a load of crap that was. He put on my heart the reality that just about everyone who has a slim figure has to exercise… the same as I would if I wanted a slim figure too. Suddenly, doing twenty minutes a day on the elliptical is a piece of cake. Not only did He give me the information I needed to loose the weight, but He took all my resentment about doing the exercise, away too!

When I am quiet in the morning I imagine the love of GodHe is the FatherHe wears a long heavy cloakHe draws me to Him~ gently ~~ slowly ~~ tenderly ~~ sweetly ~He enfolds me into His heavy cloakI lay myself against His chest I am ~me~ I am accepted I am ~me~ I am encouraged I am ~me~ I am warmI am ~me~ I am safeThis is my Father’s love for meI can stay here for hours.Talking with Him.I never want to leave this place.

Suddenly I find I can meditate! I’m doing it for an hour a day with almost no trouble at all. AA’s Step 11 (Sought through Prayer and Meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood him) was absolutely impossible for me. It used to be, even at 34 years sober, that I couldn’t sit quietly for even a couple of minutes. The goolie and goblins would get me. Those goolies called:

You’re nothing but a piece of shit! You ought to be ashamed of yourself! No body wants you let alone loves you! Why don’t you just go away and die! (etc, etc, etc.)

Yet now I am feeling this way on a long term basis not just for a day like I was here.

This ride of ‘no addictions or obsessions’ has suddenly transformed itself. Up until now, I’ve been careening at break-neck speed, through the pitch blackness, on a hairy, frightening, roller coaster; being tossed around like a rag-doll, completely out of emotional control. But suddenly, an abrupt change has occurred. Suddenly I’m finding myself in a place of absolute quiet stillness. It feels like I’m riding on a smooth white platform that’s silently and swiftly skimming across the surface of a pale blue, sparkling, glassy sea.

It is my belief that the above passages infer that every person (and not just Christians I might add) on planet earth carries a piece of our holy creator within themselves. From the president of the United States to the people who call the streets their home… everyone carries a piece of the Holy God… an image of Him… inside their persons (however, those who heed God’s call to Jesus the saving Christ, have a soul redeeming relationship).

Something very interesting happened tonight that I thought you would like to hear about. I’m taking training to be on the Crisis Call Center hotline. This evening we did role playing with the trainers for the first time in the training. Well I did a pretty piss-poor job of it and the feed-back I got from the others showed that too. This would have been a perfect ‘set up’ for me to rail against myself you think, wouldn’t it? This would have been the perfect situation for the ‘ugly voices’ to have come at me – enforce.

(this may seem hard to do at first but we caught on and I’m as impatient as a 30 second french fry in a fry cooker and my husband is as dense as a raw potato)

CAUTION: This is really, really, really important!! You must read through this entire article… first… maybe several times, in ordered to be fully mentally and emotionally prepared to do this exercise.

The thing is… Fights in a relationship create Fire… and fire has massive power behind it to destroy. You must realize that this is what you are dealing with when you fight. FIRE!! And like with any fire, when you’re handling it, utmost caution must be taken to keep it contained and under control so that it doesn’t incinerate you or your relationship.

It feels like the noose is getting tighter. Liking myself is predicated on not junking out on any drug foods. Now this abstinence even includes abstaining from Costco frozen yogurt and doing 20 minutes exercise on the elliptical??!! I don’t know if there is a bottom to this ‘abstinence’ business.

It seems I’m on the emotional ‘roller coaster’ again with no idea where I’m going to next. Apparently I haven’t arrived at God’s destination for me as the ride isn’t over yet. I’m so tired of … one… more… time… having to deal with all these uncontrollably, wild feelings!! It’s not bad enough that I have to deal with food addiction; I have to deal with all this child-abuse-PTSD too!!??

I want to apologize for the quality of my writing lately. Since the writing of the above post, I haven’t been getting very good sleep and, even though I’ve seen my psychiatrist three times in the last two weeks, the medication regime adjustments for the Bipolar, have not yet helped very much.

I don’t think that the AA slogan: “Uncover; Discover; Discard” is something to try to push an alcoholic, who was abused as a child, to do. Furthermore, I don’t think it is a saying that Bill and Bob would have approved of either.

I am the Lord your God, who rescued you from the land of Egypt, the place of your slavery. You must not have any other god but me. You must not make for yourself an idol of any kind or an image of anything in the heavens or on the earth or in the sea.

These are the verses I’m totally laser-focused on right now. I am doing my level best to live by them. Suddenly I can see their profound meaning for our current times – as clear… as… day. To put it mildly, the rewards for making God my main man, are astonishingly miraculous.

I used to have difficult feelings of aloneness and rejection because of being mostly alone here in blog-world, but this is changing. I still feel like I’m pretty much alone here, but since the ability to God/Self Soothe has ‘clicked in’ (by going through what I did the last 2 months) I’m definitely holding within myself, a dramatically different view of this aloneness. I think what I’ve been doing so far has really pushed me around the corner in my ability to adapt to inner and outer stresses. I really do believe I’ve come to a place where God is truly my ‘center’ – for everything.

Something profoundly wonderful has happened to me of late. It started in 1980 when I gave up my primary addiction – alcohol. Not long after I got sober, I began to lean very heavily on junk (flour/sugar) foods to distance myself from the agony of life without booze. I knew that doing the food thing was not good, but I was in so much emotional angst that I couldn’t stop myself. Two years into the agony of giving up this primary addiction, I had my first experience with your Christian God who (through the person of Jesus Christ) got through to me, in a very powerful way, how much He deeply, profoundly, and unconditionally, loved me. And He gave me the Holy Spirit in a very palpable way.

(this particular post is out of sequence. I included it because it was written at the very beginning of the experiment. However, I was still smoking at this time.)

* * *

I’ve been abstaining from junk food and compulsive overeating for 40 days tomorrow and I’m beginning to feel like I’m slogging up-hill with it. Today was tough and the absence of weight-loss is making it doubly tough.

I go to God (Pops is my name for Him) with almost all my problems and dilemmas and we have ‘talks’ until I get my head straightened back out again. This is one of those talks.

My friend said good bye to me. We had been meeting every week; Tuesdays from three to five. Every week for three years. We studied Christian books together. “The Names of God”; “Lord Heal My Hurts”; “The Way of Agape”

Last week she told me she didn’t want to meet with me anymore. It was yesterday that we met for the last time. Now she’s gone.

My head knows why she did it. She had to. Her daughter had foisted three of her grand children on her to babysit everyday. She was homeschooling the twelve year old. The six year old had downs syndrome and ADHA, and the baby of eight months was a screamaholic. She’s sixty two and has battled cancer in her past. Last week the daughter moved to Southern California and out of her life. My relief and worry for her was finally over. So my head understands that she desperately needed a break. She said that first she was going to sleep for a month, then see the Grand Canyon, and then work on her book. It was completely understandable why she did it.

But not all of me is cooperating with the head.

I’m an addict, using every sort of earthly means I could lay my hands on to dissociate from pain. “Any port in a storm”, so they say. Alcohol was my drug of choice; then junk food, cigarettes, caffeine, crochet, TV, spending, wandering aimlessly around the house in an overwhelming fog.

But, one-by-one I’ve been barreling through each addiction with the single-mindedness of a cougar going after it’s prey. Since last August I have become determined to be addiction free. I want to run to the arms of the only One I can truly depend upon. The One who comes with no ill after-effects… God.

But now I am braving the first storm. And it’s a doozy. A hurricane, and I have no where to hide. No addiction to protect me from the raging fury passing directly overhead.

I lay on my bed, on my side, alone in the darkened room. Frozen still while this furious storm rages all around me. Monstrous claps of thunder pulse through my body.

In a thunder clap I am flung into a room. A voice screams at me…

Get in your room!!!

A lightening bolt of PTSD flash-back strikes and I am electrified. Then another, and another. They pierce me with direct hits. Then, in the light of a strike suddenly I become aware that I have been transported… to 1960.

In the instant flash of light I see something… no… someone. A small girl… huddled in the corner of her room. Her knees pressed tightly against her chest. Her arms wrapped around her knees. She’s in shock but… strangely… I can hear her thoughts.

What did I do?! Why is he so angry? I must be horrible for him to look at me with so much rage! I’m pure evil. I must be hideous for him to look at me with so much fire in his eyes.

She stares at nothing, almost not believing she came out alive through another savage assault.

Confused… baffled… bewildered… frozen. I see her in the lightening flashes. Petrified by what just happened, she does not move. And I can not move either. I am braving this storm. With each flash I get a glimpse. My eyes are fixated on her form and on her frozen face. I dare not budge. I do not want to miss a single second of this meeting. This memory.

A single tear runs over the bridge of my nose, then down my cheek to the pillow below. As I take her in my arms, this one tear is a miracle.

Together now, we survived the storm. We have both made it through alive.

Jesus wants us to be without pretense when we come to him in prayer. Instead, we often try to be something we aren’t. We begin by concentrating on God, but almost immediately our minds wander off in a dozen different directions. The problems of the day push out our well-intentioned resolve to be spiritual. We give ourselves a spiritual kick in the pants and try again, but life crowds out prayer. We know that prayer isn’t supposed to be like this, so we give up in despair. We might as well get something done.

I haven’t written in a while. I’ve been hiding from the world. But T.E.Hanna had a good talking to me and I’m back on track again… I hope.

That’s right, I’ve quit!

What do I mean by that? Well, I’ve quit the junk food habit for six months now. Recently I also quit smoking (over two months). I’ve quit compulsively crocheting and I’ve quit compulsive computing as well. And that’s just to name a few of the things I’ve quit.

Around my sixth anniversary sober, I found myself in such excruciating emotional stress that I could bear it no longer. I had not taken a drink of alcohol for six years yet still had the taste for it. As a result, I had what I now call a ‘Showdown at the OK Corral’ with God. I told Him, in no uncertain terms, that if He didn’t do something about this obsession for booze, then I was going to go back out again. So He had better do something… and quick. Boy! Was I mad!!

I haven’t been writing lately. The thing is that I have a sister who is critiquing my writing and I’m losing all my confidence because of what she’s doing. This is why I started writing on a new blog which I am keeping secret from her.

So what am I to do with my loss of self-confidence? Give my new-found fear of writing, over to God I guess. Though I don’t have a clue what He’s going to do with it.

I don’t know what to write about anymore. I seem to have utterly, utterly, lost my way with it. The lack of confidence is sticking to me like fly paper would.

That’s all I have to say for now. Perhaps any of you guys might offer me some advice this this? I’m feeling very sadly about it. I would really appreciate any outside help I can get. I think I’ll talk to my therapist about it too. See what she has to say about my problem.

So I went to therapy yesterday. I love my current therapist, Elizabeth. I love, love, love her. She’s so busy that I have to make appointments up to two months in advance to keep my same time slot. Where I go, you can’t claim a regular slot for yourself, you have to take what you can get. I was lucky. Someone had cancelled so I got to meet with her yesterday.

Mine has been a tough life. I am not sure why it had to be that way, but it has been tough since the beginning. There are many things I deal with; Complex PTSD and DID from some extreme child abuse, schizo-affective disorder, alcoholism, suicide obsession, ulcerative colitis, constant anxiety, and a junk food obsession which is what I am working on with God right now.

Abuse can create a hugely entangled relationship between a child and their parents (for me, it was mostly with my father). My parents convinced me that this world was a horrible place and that I should stay home at all costs. I believed them. Though it appeared on the outside that they couldn’t wait to be rid of me, I think my parents wanted me to stay with them forever. But at some point children have to leave their childhood homes; I went off to college but found myself so terrified of the world that I went crawling back to mommy and daddy again.

Because my parents were pretty ‘out there’ as far as religion was concerned, I have a very spotty religious internal background. My parents took us to the Unitarian church until I and my sister were about eight years old and my brother was four. Then this most liberal of protestant churches kicked us out. As I have talked about earlier, my parents had a very warped view on the spiritual, or religious, aspects of living.

I’m still abstaining from flour/sugar products. On the 15th it will be three months.

I was on the phone with my Overeater’s Anonymous (OA) sponsor last night and what came out was the word depression. She asked why the depression and I could only say; “I don’t know why.”So she suggested I write about it… which is why I’m writing about it.

So this morning I’ve been feeling sorry for myself… feeling like an abandoned little waif. This is difficult, writing so that you might read my stuff. I want to let my hair down a bit and allow you into my world. I wear my hair in a ponytail. It’s uncomfortable to leave it hanging down. This is difficult. Impossible? I will keep trying. Continue reading →

Getting on my knees is getting harder and harder. I am railing against turning my life and will over to something other than myself. I am so used to taking care of me by myself. Funny… I need God to stay away from alcohol. I have a conscious connection with Him all day long… to stay sober. But this food business is a whole lot trickier than the alcohol. I am truly bewildered by it all.

I’ve been reading a book on Theophostic Prayer Ministry. Very interesting. Has anyone else heard about this type of therapy? As I was reading it, I noticed that it resonated with my own story. I have experienced more than several spontaneous (prayer induced) healings in my life that resulted in permanent heart-changing views about… who I was… what life was about… what I could overcome… and many other things.

I'm Michelle. This is my blog. I write about women and fatness, expound upon semi-coherent thoughts I have in the middle of the night, and offer tough love to those in whom I am disappointed; they are legion.